Trademarks are critical legal protections for businesses seeking to retain the integrity of their brands. Neglecting to obtain a trademark can enable competitors to more closely imitate your work or even prevent you from marketing your products and services beyond state lines. To prevent competitors from duplicating the originality of your work and undermining your rights, obtaining a… Read More »
Intellectual property rights, for many people, don’t ring as true as tangible property rights. But those people don’t know just how influential and important intellectual property rights can be. Many famous entertainers make a lot of money simply because they own the rights to the artistic property they’ve created – in many cases, they make enough to live… Read More »
An office action is a letter from the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) notifying the applicant of a problem with a trademark application. In an office action, the U.S. government trademark examining attorney informs you, the applicant, of a specific problem with your application. The problem could be anything from a technical error with your application… Read More »
The idea of “property” isn’t very tough to figure out. Many people apply this simple formula: if you paid for a house, that’s your property. If you bought a car, that’s your property. The issue does get a little more complicated when you realize you don’t just own property because you paid for it. Sometimes you can create… Read More »
The Supreme Court of New South Wales has added weight to the push towards alternative dispute resolution in a recent decision[1] that found that disputes involving questions of ownership of patents and patent applications do not fall exclusively within the province of the Commissioner of Patents or the Federal Court.
In deciding whether to file a trademark application to protect your domain name, the first step is to determine whether you use your domain name as a trademark. If your domain name is only used as the Uniform Resource Locator (“URL”) (i.e., http://www.example.com) to indicate an address on the World Wide Web, then you are not using your… Read More »
The Bolar Provision typically defines circumstances in which the proprietors of a patent are precluded from preventing third parties from performing acts which are otherwise protected by patent law. The Bolar provision originated in the United States, by virtue of the judgment Roche Products v Bolar Pharmaceuticals[1]. This judgement had limited the scope of the ‘experimental use exemption’… Read More »
An important requirement when filing your federal trademark is showing that you are “commercial using” the mark you want to register. The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) requires proof of “use” so that people do not attempt to register marks to just “reserve” them. 1. How to prove “use” of a trademark. If you are filing a… Read More »
Ever since I was a law student learning about copyright law, particularly, the provision that gives an author the right to terminate his or her transfer of copyright in a work (the “Copyright Termination Right”), I’ve wondered how the record and publishing companies were going to respond when an artist, songwriter, or composer actually attempted to recapture his… Read More »
So, you may have a website and you want to drive traffic – potential customers – to your site. One of the ways that you do that is by designating “keywords”. These are descriptive words that are associated with your website. When a potential customer enters words into a search engine, perhaps looking for a local florist by… Read More »